Emirate land mine

There were no explosions in Moscow for six years. Now officials understand that the work to prevent terrorist attacks must again be started from scratch.

The message that the head of the FSB, Alexander Bortnikov, informed the president about the attacks, appeared on the Kremlin website on Monday at nine in the morning. Federal TV channels were also silent for almost an hour after the explosion, and the President and Prime Minister did not react until after noon. Mayor Yury Luzhkov was the first to come under the cameras. He immediately said: suicide bombers. Patriarch Kirill, says a source in the patriarchy, was informed about the explosions during the liturgy in the Intercession Monastery. He ordered the priests to be sent to hospitals and immediately sent to him a list of the names of the victims, so that he could personally pray for the repose of the dead and for the health of the victims. In his sermon, the Patriarch urged people not to cash in on someone else's grief and lashed out at taxi drivers who had raised their prices for transport.

As for the taxi drivers, it was impromptu, the patriarch found out about it two minutes before he went out to preach, says a Newsweek source. He understands why he condemned them: "It was a test of humanity, and they acted according to the logic of marauders." Two hours later, Vladimir Putin was already talking about terrorists and taxi drivers. Dmitry Medvedev went to the Lubyanka and said about the same thing there as at an emergency meeting a few hours earlier.

By Friday evening there were 40 dead. 84 victims were in hospitals. Already on Thursday, the head of the FSB reported that the organizers were known and the first arrests had been made. And yet it was clear to everyone that the special services had not coped with ensuring security. The security forces report that the bandit underground has been destroyed, and the channels of the militants have been cut off, says a source in the Duma. But the reality is that the gang underground is alive and well, and it has become more difficult to open sources of funding.

Newsweek's interlocutor in the Kremlin says that operational information about the preparation of terrorist attacks in Moscow appeared on Friday, three days before the explosions. The interlocutor in the Ministry of Internal Affairs confirms: the capital's security forces were notified in advance that they had to prepare for something. True, he names another day - Sunday. One of the police officers working on the red line of the Moscow metro, says that on Monday morning, even before the attacks, they had an orientation to selectively check the documents of suspicious women in connection with the threat of a terrorist attack. According to him, last autumn such an alarm was announced three times.

Forty minutes elapsed between the explosions at the Lubyanka and at the Park Kultury, but after the first explosion no one was notified of the terrorist threat and the evacuation of people from the subway did not begin. Newsweek sources close to law enforcement agencies say the Kremlin has no intention of punishing officials yet. “Even if specific miscalculations are discovered, there will be no demonstrative censures or resignations - this is politically inappropriate,” the source in the Duma says.

LIKE IN FOG

Last Monday, Marina Mizina, as usual, went to work at MGIMO. At 8.40, when the train reached the Park Kultury station, Marina went to the exit. “On the left, I saw a fiery flash, the cars were shaking. A military man was standing in front of me, and all the fragments hit him, and I was flooded with his blood. Another man nearby was shot in the head.” The lobby was shrouded in acrid smoke, continues Marina, "everything became like a fog." Someone shouted: "Terrorist attack!"

Explosives experts quickly determined that in both cases the center of the explosions was 120–150 cm from the floor. The bombs were made of plastite and stuffed with nails and rebar scraps. “The bodies of the suicide bombers were torn apart by the explosion, but both heads were well preserved after the explosion, so there will be no problems with identification,” one of the high-ranking employees of the Investigative Committee told Newsweek on the same day. According to a Newsweek source in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the DNA samples of the suicide bombers were immediately sent to criminalists in the North Caucasian republics.

The name of one of the suicide bombers became known on Friday. This is 17-year-old Janet Abdurakhmanova, the widow of the leader of the Dagestani militants, Umalat Magomedov (Al-Bara), who was killed during a special operation in December last year. According to investigators, she blew herself up at the Park of Culture. She was first identified from a post-mortem photograph, and later confirmed by a blood test from her mother.

A source in the Ministry of Internal Affairs says that two men were involved in organizing the attack. Their identities are also established, they are put on the wanted list. It is known that they rented an apartment in the Khamovniki district of the capital and stored components of explosive devices in it. That's where the bombs were made.

In the early morning of March 29, near the Vorobyovy Gory station, they met Abdurakhmanova and her accomplice - apparently, they had just arrived by bus to Luzhniki. Most likely the suicide bombers arrived from Kizlyar. Men hung belts or bags with explosives on them. How exactly the suicide bombers got into the subway is not yet known exactly. According to one version, they went to the "South-West", according to another - either to the "Vorobyovy Gory" or to "Sportivnaya". It is not known whether they entered together or separately.

According to the latest information, one of the men has been identified as Kazbek Mataev. He has been on the wanted list since 2002. He was suspected of involvement in a series of explosions in the Urus-Martan district of Chechnya in 2009. “Yes, we know such a person, but we ourselves have been looking for him for several years,” an officer on duty at the Nadterechny District Department of Internal Affairs of Chechnya told Newsweek.

Perhaps there were more than two terrorists. On Thursday, the body of a girl with traces of injections was found in Mytishchi near Moscow - the death was allegedly caused by a drug overdose. She had a passport in the name of Tamila Aliyeva, a resident of Kizlyar. It is possible that this is another potential suicide bomber who, for some reason, did not set off the mine and was subsequently eliminated by the organizers of the attack as an unnecessary witness.

HOME DELIVERY

The North Caucasian version immediately became the main one. At first, there was an opinion that the explosions in the metro were the militants' answer to the liquidation of a number of well-known field commanders. On March 2, the ideologue of the militants Alexander Tikhomirov, known as Said Buryatsky, and other members of the underground were killed. On March 24, Anzor Astemirov, one of the leaders of the Kabardino-Balkarian jamaat, was killed.

But on Wednesday, a video message from Doku Umarov appeared in which he claims responsibility for the attacks and declares that this is revenge for a special operation of federal forces carried out on February 11 in Ingushetia near the village of Arshty. Then 18 militants and four civilians were killed, who were gathering wild garlic in the surrounding forest. The Amir of the Caucasus Emirate said that the Russians think in vain that the war will not affect them, recalling the well-known group of suicide bombers Riyadus-Salihiin.

Sources in the power structures of Chechnya add that not only Umarov has suicide bombers. The field commanders of the Gakaev brothers also have them. It was they who sent suicide bombers-cyclists last summer to blow up in Grozny.

A year ago, military experts noted that the militants had become more active and were changing their tactics. They switched to pinpoint attacks on policemen and officials using suicide bombers, explains Vitaly Shlykov, the former head of the military-economic department of the GRU. In December last year, Vladimir Ustinov, the plenipotentiary in the Southern Federal District, admitted that in 2009, compared to 2008, the number of terrorist attacks in the region had increased by almost a third. Last Wednesday there were two more explosions - this time in Kizlyar, Dagestan.

Two suicide bombers, both dressed in police uniforms, tried to attack the Kizlyar police station last year, following the example of blowing up the Nazran police department. They failed. The car exploded next to the building, and the second suicide bomber blew himself up when operatives and investigators gathered at the site of the first explosion. In Moscow, the target is civilians. In Kizlyar, the second suicide bomber, who portrayed a policeman, according to eyewitnesses, drove away onlookers before the explosion. As a result, 12 people died, including nine policemen and one UPC investigator. About 30 people were injured.

The shahid belt is an effective mechanism in a purely economic sense as well. “It’s a myth that it takes thousands of dollars to organize [a Moscow-type attack],” says one of the GRU officers, a specialist in subversive activities, “three kilos of home-made plastite, a kilo of nails, two tickets to Moscow cost 10,000–15,000 rubles.” The GRU officer has no doubts that an operation similar to the one in Moscow can be easily carried out from the wheels: “We arrived in the morning, an hour later they put a mine on a suicide bomber in the nearest public toilet, after two - boom.” At the same time, neither covert agents nor safe houses are needed, "there would be a volunteer suicide bomber."

Experts take Doku Umarov's threats very seriously. “It cannot be ruled out that the militants will show particular interest in the Easter holidays and Victory Day on May 9,” said Sergey Goncharov, president of the Association of Veterans of the Alfa anti-terror unit.

LIME AGENCY

Sources in the Duma and the Kremlin admit that the attack caused confusion - primarily because everyone thought that the threat no longer existed. Several sources in the Duma are now saying that the special services generally have big problems with undercover work.

“They draw fake agents, and information is often drawn from open sources, including the media,” says a Newsweek source in the Duma. Another adds: “Reports from operational staff coming upstairs are being diluted. No more than 10% of the content remains in them.

It's not easy to deal with this. The president does not have an assistant for national security issues, the Security Council has to deal with everything, and the capabilities of the Control and Audit Department are limited. “There have been cases,” the source says. - For example, you need to learn about the situation in Dagestan, but there is no presidential institute that could provide comprehensive information. As a result [certificate] is written by the interested executive authority. Adjusted for the fact that the warring law enforcement agencies also give dirt on each other.

Once with the prevention of the problem, the only thing left is to toughen the penalties. On Monday, Dmitry Medvedev instructed the Kremlin's lawyers to analyze the legal framework in the field of combating terrorism and extremism. Members of the Communist Party faction in the Duma again raised the issue of applying the death penalty to the organizers of terrorist actions.

“You won't scare the suicide bombers,” said Pavel Krasheninnikov, head of the committee on criminal legislation. For terrorism, they already give life imprisonment, and last Friday the president proposed toughening the responsibility for accomplices: “To create such a model, when anyone who helps – no matter what he does: cooks soup or washes clothes – has committed a complete crime.”

A separate question is how to coordinate the work of law enforcement agencies in the event of a terrorist attack. To do this, the Kremlin is going to develop a terrorist threat scale. As planned, it will allow not only to classify the level of danger, but also to clearly define the program of actions of each department and their coordination in case of different types of threat. In the United States, such a system was introduced eight years ago.

This idea, they say in the Duma, first appeared in 1996. In 2004, after the first explosions in the metropolitan metro, the possible introduction of a threat scale was announced by the then Secretary of the Security Council, Igor Ivanov. But he immediately made the reservation that Russian society is not yet ready for such things - in the sense that there will be a constant threat of panic. Two years ago, the next secretary of the Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, spoke about the scale of threats.

Last week, he again returned to this idea, and a source in the Duma claims that this time it is really close to implementation: most likely, the head of state will introduce a list of terrorist threat levels and the procedure for determining them by decree. In Russia, the scale of threats is likely to be a three-tier system, a source in the State Duma told Newsweek. The order of actions of law enforcement agencies and their coordination will be prescribed for each level of threat separately.

"Worse than an alarm clock that doesn't ring, only an alarm clock that rings constantly," said Edward Turzansky, senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “When they talk about danger all the time, people get bored - they take off their boots for screening at the airport with irritation.” If you make such a system a vowel, it is really not far from panic. Turzansky reminds us that extra ears for law enforcement are a vigilant population.